By feature writer Alexey Starovoitov: Only a few years ago creating your hotel webpage seemed to be an unreasonable waste of time and money, and, now it is impossible to imagine a quality hotel without a fully fledged website providing a mine of information about your business, a good range of color photos and your contact details. Nowadays, if you don’t have your business registered in Google Places, you’re toast. Your hotel is not at booking.com? You are kicked out. You failed to react to changes in the market of mobile devices? You are at the bottom, together with Nokia. One thing that you should definitely be concerned about is an astonishing growth of the mobile market.

By feature writer Steve Curtin: Customer service is a voluntary act that demonstrates a genuine desire to satisfy, if not delight, a customer. Within this short definition, there are six elements that I suggest we explore further:

By E-ProDirect: Marketing to meeting planners becomes much easier when you can make accurate predictions. When a company taps into the statistics on general behaviour of professional planners, it becomes much easier to make sense of when they book a meeting or event and why they choose the way they do.

By feature writer Yoland Perras: Some of you will recall doing a “Critical path” using floppy disk that later became a diskette on a very noisy computer when saving your data. Cumbersome, slow and time consuming. At the end, probably like me, you ended up doing it by hand. Multiple corrections had to be made and often went with the temper of your “immediate boss” first and then to higher authorities. I learned the hard way and I cannot contemplate, in this fast and ever changing world of ours, performing such tasks the same way today.

BluSky Marketing has released their third Luxury Hotel Benchmarking Report based on the results from their Online Hotel Guest Experience Survey Programme. The benchmarking report is the only one of its kind for the luxury and boutique hotel sector and continues to grow it’s stature as additional luxury properties continue to sign up to the programme.

By Thomas Bailey Jr: Thirty-four years after becoming a founding partner of Hnedak Bobo Group, Greg Hnedak has cashed out his shares in the firm on Front Street to become a full-time developer of hotels. Just like in architecture, he’s painstakingly aware that it is the details that matter.

By feature writers Anne Edwards and Jean-Pierre van der Rest: What comes first — the desire for a good tip, or the desire to provide great service? In countries in which tipping is not standard practice, does the provision of service suffer? What is your tipping policy and how does it impact on your staff?

Following two years of declines, hotel guest satisfaction has increased significantly, reaching its highest levels in the past seven years, according to the J.D. Power 2013 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index StudySM released today.